(1) Mon May 05 2014 22:57April Film Roundup:
Running late this month because of work on Situation Normal. But I'm sick of writing that tonight, so let's crank out some great reviews of (mostly) great movies.

The Bucharest Experiment (2013): Has kind of a silly creepypasta feel I think Kris might enjoy. There's a funny meta twist at the end, and then this twist is immediately followed by another twist that takes it into real-life horrifying territory and makes this a difficult movie to write about. I don't have the critical skill to critique this movie. I don't know if it "works". I don't know if its final message is diluted or enhanced by basically goofing off for sixty minutes beforehand.

The preceding short, Before the Fall (2011) was creepy in a less complicated way, and I can unabashedly recommend it to the likes of Kris.

Alien (1979): What a wonderful movie. It was engaging even though I knew everything that was going to happen. I read the Alan Dean Foster novelization when I was a kid, and you can't get very far in today's society without learning what happens in Alien.

Things I wasn't prepared for that blew me away: the slow burn at the beginning, the stunning dinginess of the spacecraft. ("Dingy spaceship" is my overall favorite aesthetic.) Unfortunately the second half is not as good as the first. The android and the ship's computer are goofy and unnecessary to the plot. Wouldn't this be a better movie if Ash was an amoral human, and Ripley found out about the secret order by snooping through the crappy 1979 computer? It sure would.

I was also surprised by how humanoid the xenomorph is in this movie. I mean, yeah, it's a man in a rubber suit, but I'm so used to seeing xenomorphs depicted on all fours, like big cats, that seeing the man in the suit sort of took me out of it. It's not like Godzilla where the scale of the shot tricks you into not seeing the man in the suit.

This movie is also responsible for one of the odder bits of IMDB trivia I've encountered:

According to Ridley Scott in the DVD commentary, he had envisioned a moment in the ending scenes of Ripley and the alien in the space shuttle in which the alien would be sexually aroused by Ripley. Scott says that in the scene, after Ripley hides in the closet, the alien would find her and would be staring at her through the glass door. The alien would then start touching itself as if comparing its body to Ripley's. The idea was eventually scrapped.

I like to think the idea was "scrapped" as soon as Ridley Scott woke up and said "Wow, haha, what a weird moment I just envisioned in that dream, I guess there is a lot of sexual subtext in this film I'm making."

Border Incident (1949): Disappointing. I was hoping Ricardo Montalban's Mexican cop would preemptively avenge Charlton Heston's Mexican cop in Touch of Evil, and he's fine, but there's only so much you can do in an earnest-liberal 1940s film. Especially egregious: the framing device narration which effectively says "We feel it is important to inform the public of this terrible problem which has been completely resolved and there's nothing to worry about."

I feel like you could remake this movie without changing much.

Alphaville (1965): I've been wanting to see this movie for years, and yet dreading it. For I knew Alphaville was the movie that would make or break my hypothesis that the unrealized destiny of the French New Wave was to make awesome genre films. And... yep, I was right. Great movie. Everything that's boring and pretentious about French art films is everything that's funny and fresh with this movie.

I posited last year that Fahrenheit 451 is Truffault wanting to make a sci-fi film, despite a history of looking down on the genre, because Bradbury's story is so good. Goddard also thinks American genre films are goofy, but he wants in. He wants to do the fistfights and the secret agents and the evil supercomputers. But he doesn't have any money. So he just appropriates the tropes without changing the visuals. Combine it with high-quality gags and you've got a winner. The one thing I couldn't stand: the computer's voice. So grating, and it went on for what seemed like minutes. (And may have actually been minutes.)

PS: Just gonna start a rumor that Alphaman is set in the same universe as Alphaville.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976): Tragically ending my streak of movies whose titles start with "A" or "B", this is the first and lesser-known of the two movies about David Bowie's crotch. It's 139 minutes long, it doesn't drag, and unlike a lot of arty SF movies (Alphaville) its plot has a strong through-line and original (non-borrowed) science-fiction elements.

And David Bowie is really, really good in this. Like, anything I can think of makes it sound like I'm snarking on him being a huge weirdo, but he plays a really good space alien. He's like a less friendly Tetsuo Milk. The human/alien sex scene in particular is really touching. Makes me wonder where Ridley Scott got his idea for a scene where "the alien would find her and would be staring at her through the glass door."

Actually, let me zoom in on the human/alien sex scene, because there was a shot there that creeped me out more than anything in Alien, and more to the point I have no idea why it was so creepy.

A little light-spoiler background: David Bowie is an alien, as I mentioned before. We frequently see him in flashback on his home planet, where he's a typical Star Trek style alien: he's bald, he's got lizard eyes, his nose is maybe a little weird. Just before the sex scene there's a scene where David Bowie's in the bathroom. taking off his human disguise, revealing his alien form. His girlfriend (Candy Clark), who has just found out she's sleeping with an alien, kind of sneaks to the bathroom door and slowly reaches for the handle and opens the door. And there's David Bowie and he's an alien and the girlfriend screams.

Here's the thing I don't understand: I already know what the alien looks like. I've seen alien David Bowie, not in glimpses like the xenomorph in Alien but in big detailed close-ups. So why is it so creepy, that moment when Candy Clark is inching her hand towards the bathroom door? Is it because she doesn't know? Is it because I've seen alien David Bowie on his goofy-looking home planet, but now I'm about to see him in a 1970s bathroom with cheesy wood paneling? Is it because I know it's not just alien David Bowie in there, but naked alien David Bowie, and I'm afraid of what his alien junk looks like? (Good job on the alien junk, BTW, Ellis Burman, Jr.) Am I conditioned to think any inching-towards-the-door scene is creepy? I don't know, but it's probably the first two.

He Walked By Night (1948) Sadly, even though Richard Basehart is in this movie, Gypsy did not show up for the showing. I didn't enjoy the main thrust of this movie but there were so many great set pieces. The killer moving around LA through the storm drains, the oscilliscope con job, the pre-Identikit Identikit scene where the robbery victims collectively converge on a portrait of the suspect. But the best part was early in the movie, when the police dragnet rounded up a number of other noir movies in progress, and we got a little noir sampler.

PS: There's a character in this movie named Chuck Jones.

Fri May 09 2014 18:16Crosspost:
Apparently I have a new weblog! It's my NYPL staff weblog and I've put up a post about a project I worked on with Paul Beaudoin on like my second day at NYPL Labs. We turned a historical contour map into a Minecraft world. This is cool on its own, but it also means I now know how to programmatically generate Minecraft maps with Python scripts. The possibilities are endless, and you'll be seeing more of them later. Like, when I'm done with this novel.

Wed May 28 2014 11:04@MinecraftSigns, And Minecraft Maps:
I finished a draft of Situation Normal and sent it in to writing group, so I've now got time to reveal the other non-NYPL project that's been taking up all of my time. Ta-da! It's a bot! @MinecraftSigns posts signs that I found in Minecraft maps using the pymclevel library I learned for the Historical Minecraft project.

For a long time, signs were the only form of textual self-expression possible in Minecraft. You get four lines of 15 characters each. In normal play they're generally used as labels or signposts. Custom mapmakers also use them for instructions to the player, dialogue, narration, and hidden messages. They are a medium of communication with more severe character restrictions than Twitter, which makes them a great subject for a Twitter bot. Signs posted so far range from the profound:

This one's
about dropping

To something I think I saw on one of those trendy t-shirts recently:

peanuts and
pickles and
potatoes and
Paul

To the crowd favorite so far:

Do not
Extinguish fire
You will lose.

Oh goodie, you say; another bot from Leonard! What will he come up with next? Yet another bot? The answer is yes. But, before you dismiss @MinecraftSigns as just another window into a beautiful realm of found poetry, ask yourself this: how did I get this data in the first place? Where did all these Minecraft signs come from? Oh, I don't know, maybe from the sixty-five thousand Minecraft maps I've got on my hard drive?

That's right. After the Historical Minecraft project I thought back to late 2011 when I was enjoying the world of custom Minecraft maps. I then thought forward to early 2012, when I was kind of done with custom Minecraft maps, but when I moved all the ZIP files I'd downloaded onto a backup drive rather than deleting them, because these things don't stay on the Internet forever and it would be nice to have a copy, say, twenty years from now. And then, in early 2014, two years into that twenty, I was thinking about that little act of preservation and it hit me: who's archiving the rest of those maps?

The answer was: apparently nobody. And then the answer quickly became: I am. From the middle of April to the middle of May I archived 65,000 maps linked to from the Minecraft maps forum. That's out of about 100,000 maps total. I verified that 25,000 maps are gone, and there are about 10,000 maps I didn't get because they're scattered across a million different file-sharing sites.

So, at least a quarter of the maps put up since 2010 are already gone. I was able to get screenshots for a lot of the missing maps, so it's not a total loss, but that's still really bad, and not only because it's generally bad when interesting things leave the Internet.

Minecraft is the medium used by a lot of accomplished designers and artists. The most obvious examples IMO are Vechs (Super Hostile) and three_two (Vinyl Fantasy). Those two are pretty legendary and their maps are in no danger of being lost, but there's a lot of really great stuff published in 2011-2012 that was lost in the flood. 2011-2012 was the silent-film era of Minecraft custom maps, when the genres were being defined and the first wild experiments were happening, but when the medium was not taken seriously enough to warrant systematic preservation. In the future we'll have tools for finding the overlooked gems, but first those maps have to make it to the future.

Speaking of the future, Minecraft is the training ground for the next generation of game designers, the way ZZT was the training ground for my generation. There's a ZZT archive; it's got about 2,000 ZZT games. How many are lost? Sure would have been nice to save more of them, but all we had back then was BBSes. We didn't have a big official "ZZT forum" with a special place for posting links to your games.

Finally, even a map that's made by a young child who grows up to be an actuary rather than a game designer is valuable. For one, it's valuable to the actuary. I didn't grow up to be a visual artist, but I value this awful, mysterious poster I drew when I was six. That poster would be long gone if someone (my mother) hadn't archived it for me. Second, these maps might be useful in the aggregate as a source of information about period slang or the way children visualize three-dimensional space. Third...

Well, I think one reason Minecraft is so popular with kids is it recreates an experience that American kids generally aren't allowed to have anymore: going outside and playing in a semi-natural environment, on your own or with friends, without parental supervision. There's this infamously bad Minecraft map from 2011 called Quest for Gallell, which turned out to be made by a six-year-old. Presumably this goofy swashbuckling playthrough was made before the players knew they were making fun of a six-year-old's map, but if you watch the video you'll notice that the players understand how to approach the map: like kids playing together in the woods. They're acting out kids acting out adults.

Quest for Gallell is the three-dimensional record of an imaginative play session, which you can play through yourself if you want. It sucks that kids can't play outside anymore, but at least we have some records of what they do instead. Those records are worth saving.